Customer Reviews
Saturday - Ian McEwan - By: reedydeluxe, 19 Jul 2008 
Before seeing what other reviewers have written about this book, i thought i may be alone in thinking that this book is surely one of the most pretentious & not to mention laborious i have ever laid hands on.
The akward surgeon Perowne has stayed with me so long, not because his exploits kept me riveted, but because of the amount of time & effort i ploughed into finishing this book.
I found the characters hard to get along with & i had little, if any sympathy for anything that they suffered, and, again, as mentioned by a fellow reviewer, some moments are so pretentious (need i mention reciting dover beach to your attacker) they become laughable. The environment & the people in it that Mcewan has laid down in the book seem to be a world away, behind the thick screen of London's elite upper middle class. This makes them hard to identify with for most of us, & makes the book even harder to stomach.
Although i seem to have poured scorn upon this title, it does have one or two redeeming features. The atmosphere captured with the crowds ralllying in the heart of london is truly vivid, this however, is not enough to save this book from a serious case of self impotant failiure.
A Riveting Read - By: LindyLouMac, 15 Jul 2008 
Having just been lent a copy of Ian McEwan's more recent novel On Chesil Beach I decided that I should read Saturday first, as the copy my husband read was on our bookshelves. I have previously read & enjoyed, The Cement Garden, Enduring Love, Amsterdam & Atonement. The latter is still my favourite, although I highly recommend Saturday as a thought provoking read.
Saturday as the title suggests covers just one day, February 15th 2003 in the life of modern day Londoner Henry Perowne. A successful neurosurgeon living a comfortable middle class existence, happily married to Rosalind, a lawyer & two grown-up children Daisy a poet & Theo a musician. His day starts as he watches the dawn from his bedroom window & events as the day progresses cause him to examine his life & beliefs in detail. In fact detail to the extreme is something this story is full of along with lots of literary & musical references. The detail McEwan goes into on subjects as diverse as brain surgery & a squash match are riveting. The brain surgery details made me feel uncomfortable, as for the squash match I felt I was playing the game myself. He writes in such a realistic manner, the fifties housewives cleanliness & the old peoples homes descriptions were also parts where I actuallly felt I was there, memories of my own may be?
The story builds slowly to its dramatic climax with Henry spending his Saturday preparing for a family gathering. On the day the streets of London were filled with hundreds of thousands of anti-war protestors, which seemed to have a disconnected effect on everything that happened to Henry that day
I enjoyed this so much that I am going to start On Chesil Beach straight away!
Simply fantastic - By: L. Eggleston, 10 Jun 2008 If you like to race through books that have explosive plots which twist & unravel themselves at a breathtaking pace... then this probably isn't for you.
Instead this is a richly detailed & analytical book which deserves to be read slowly, while contemplating the subtle points the author makes. The reviewers who have said they gave up as the book was 'boring' have completely missed the point. It's the incidental casual lines & phrases, irrelevant to the overalll plot, which reveal the most about the main protagonist & his take on the world.
By involving the reader so deeply with Perowne's thoughts & feelings, I could hardly bear to read at the point when his family is in danger. Of course, the people who say they 'skimmed over' large parts will probably have arrived at this section lacking any empathy with the situation he is facing, but hey, that's their problem. I thought this book was fantastic.
mostly gripping, sometimes puzzling - By: Geoff Lowe, 08 Jun 2008 
I quite enjoyed this, because it gives us a lot to think about. But, as with several of McEwan's novels, it's a little bit patchy in parts. Take the family re-union - with Theo, Henry's blues guitar son, daughter Daisy the poet returning from Paris, John Grammatic, his poet father-in-law, & Rosalind, his wife - disturbed by madman Baxter & his mate, with a knife-threatening attack. This section is gripping.
But 2-3 hrs after, in the same evening/night, would Henry (the neurosurgeon) reallly get a calll to cover in hospital on the same victim (Baxter) who he's just thrown down his own staircase?
Overalll, though, this book infiltrates our consciousness with a precise, yet risky, combination of scalpel & pen.
One of his best - By: Robert Martin, 25 May 2008 I am a fan of McEwan & this was, in my humble opinion, one of his best. The main character is inspiring in his compassion for humanity & his magnanimous ability to forgive . If you haven't read it - I urge you to do so.
